The first really exciting thing from Run 2 at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (at least for me) has finally appeared. A 2.9 TeV dielectron event was recorded by CMS on August 22. At this mass a new Z' boson is not excluded by Run 1 searches.... And in the whole Run 1 data the highest-mass dielectron event collected by CMS was only 1.8 TeV. So by raising the centre-of-mass energy by 60% we collect a 60%-higher-mass event, but with 0.5% of the collisions. It is nice to think that the event might really be the first hint of a new resonance !

There has been much public condemnation of the destruction of the Temple of Bel at Palmyra by Islamic State (IS), as well as the wider devastation being inflicted on the cultural heritage of Syria and Iraq by both IS and its opponents in Syria’s civil war.

Both Syria and Iraq are party to all relevant treaties protecting cultural heritage, but this has not stopped the rampant violations. This implies that the problem doesn’t lie with inadequate laws, but rather with compliance and enforcement.

Back around 1960, at school I enjoyed a laboratory lecture on liquid nitrogen, watching a deep frozen squash ball being shattered at a temperature well below that at which it turns from a rubber into a glass, and then seeing a nail being driven into a block of wood with a hammer whose head was made of frozen mercury.  The repeated impacts left an impression of the nail head in the soft metal.

In the attempt to choose a mate, it's no surprise that females will select the more "attractive" of two males, but now a new study reveals that female túngara frogs are susceptible to the "decoy" effect, where the introduction of a third, inferior mate results in the female choosing the less attractive of the first two options.

The results of this study counter the rational choice models that are currently used in sexual selection theory, suggesting they may prove inadequate to explain decisions in socially complex and dynamic mating arenas.

To detect the occurrence of the decoy effect in frogs' mating choices, Amanda Lea and Mike Ryan conducted experiments using 80 female túngaras, which are known to be attracted to male calls of low frequency and long duration.

Hospira has announced that Inflectra, (infliximab), the first monoclonal antibody (mAb) biosimilar therapy, has been registered in Australia. This registration paves the way for the Federal Government to reduce the cost of some of the most expensive medicines on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS). A biosimilar is a biologic medicine that has been developed to treat the same diseases as the originator product and the marketing hope is that it will deliver a 20-30 percent reduction in the price paid for the therapy.

Young people who identify with the goth subculture might be at increased risk of depression and self-harm, according to new research published in The Lancet Psychiatry journal.

The findings show that teenagers who identified very strongly with being a goth at age 15 were three times more likely to be clinically depressed and were five times more likely to self-harm at age 18 than young people who did not identify with the goth subculture.

"Our study does not show that being a goth causes depression or self-harm, but rather that some young goths are more vulnerable to developing these conditions," says lead author Dr Lucy Bowes from the University of Oxford in the UK.

Most people know smoking is risky, by now it is something of an IQ test if you take up that habit. There is no amount of awareness that will stop all people from doing all things, young people like to rebel and if they get hooked on nicotine, it can be difficult to pull away after they come to their senses.

But both harm reduction and smoking cessation can help once people decide to quit: There are other tobacco products, like snus or chewing tobacco, and then there are nicotine replacements, like gums, patches and e-cigarettes.

Yet they are all made by corporations and each corporation believes it will benefit by confusion, so a large number of people aren’t aware of the differences. Unfortunately, overly broad US Food and Drug Administration labels don't help.

Physicists have found a radical new way confine electromagnetic energy without it leaking away, akin to throwing a pebble into a pond with no splash. It appears to contradict a fundamental tenet of electrodynamics, that accelerated charges create electromagnetic radiation, said lead researcher Dr. Andrey Miroshnichenko from The Australian National University (ANU).

"This problem has puzzled many people. It took us a year to get this concept clear in our heads," said Miroshnichenko, from the ANU Research School of Physics and Engineering. "Ever since the beginning of quantum mechanics people have been looking for a configuration which could explain the stability of atoms and why orbiting electrons do not radiate." 

People around the world are living longer, even in some of the poorest countries, but a complex mix of fatal and nonfatal ailments causes a tremendous amount of health loss, according to a new analysis of all major diseases and injuries in 188 countries.

Thanks to marked declines in death and illness caused by HIV/AIDS and malaria in the past decade and significant advances made in addressing communicable, maternal, neonatal, and nutritional disorders, health has improved significantly around the world. Global life expectancy at birth for both sexes rose by 6.2 years (from 65.3 in 1990 to 71.5 in 2013), while healthy life expectancy, or HALE, at birth rose by 5.4 years (from 56.9 in 1990 to 62.3 in 2013).

An editorial in the Wall Street Journal summarizes the European Union’s decades-long flight from science, common sense and consistency. These un- or even anti-science positions are driven by many idées fixes, baseless myths and superstitions, promulgated by “consumer groups” and by deep green “environmentalists,” who claim to be concerned about Mother Earth.